These are important questions, Mark. It is best to let God speak to you in His own time and His own way. God is probably sending you signals right now that may seem like your own thoughts, the voice of conscience, intuitions and inspirations, things someone says to you, things God puts in your path or doors that open up. Still, you should always feel free to pray, to let God know your concerns, to make yourself available to divine purposes.

How to separate divine directives from one’s own desires is the most serious difficulty in the spiritual life. The key is to have what I call a “clarified soul.” That requires getting the clutter out of the way — all the things that distract you, all the pushes and pulls you find in your own feelings and desires, to reach a calm quiet that enables true intuitions and intimations of the divine to come through. If you are quite sure that you have set your own desires aside, through prayer or meditation or just serene quiet, then you can be fairly certain that the prompts that come to you are at least in part divine.

Dear Jerry L Martin,
I have heard about your book, though I have yet to actually read it. I must ask when God answered you was it a literal voice that you heard? I don’t mean to sound like I am doubting you it is just that I find it amazing. Also I am going through a period of doubt. I am doing many things to assure myself of my faith (I am a Christian), such as studying Near Death Experiences and many other things. I hope to conquer this and continue to be a Christian as it is part of who I am.

Yes, I heard a real voice — though Abigail, my future wife, sitting on the park bench beside me, did not. I would not have been surprised if she had heard it — it certainly seemed “out there” — but I was not surprised that she did not. I took it that it was a voice meant for me. My experience was much more “real” than the divine signals most people receive, which come in the form of nudges and clues and sometimes experiences that, however moving and profound, are difficult to take as “proof” that they are from God. This is what it is like to live life in tandem with an unseen God. That is why I like Paul’s phrase, “evidences of things unseen.” We do have evidence — we don’t only have arbitrary beliefs — but the evidence is quiet and elusive. Why? I think it is because our relation to God is supposed to be transformative. Living with God requires a turning of the soul from the dark to the light. Moving past our ego and fleshly wants enables us to notice the subtle prompts God sends our way. I hope the God book helps you find your way. Bless you!

A friend of mine gave me a very good book on Near Death Experiences by a Dutch physician, I believe. My own knowledge of the afterlife comes through three messages or visions reported in God: An Autobiography. They are all good news!

Further to our conversation permit me to clarify some of my biases, in hopes a constructive dialogue may ensue, not merely an obedient or contentious one.

I neither believe nor disbelieve in God, that would be far too human and thus irrelevant. All This is, is God. It’s not a matter of some anthropomorphized persona referring to itself as “the God of all” suggesting dominion or creationist authorship or seeking any obedience from anyone. That voice is a false voice, a false God.

This is inseparable, radiant, like conjoined twins it is both form and emptiness, expressive and silent, unstained by time or space and yet quite sanguine with the serendipitous nature of experience and phenomena.

No God, no voice, would or could ever suggest, even remotely, authorship or individuated preexistent presence – that is fools’ gold. Once one (mind) suggests or envisages subjectivity, there are objects, there is what’s imagined to be self and other, the dualistic myth of individuated consciousness. It is this very mystery of inseparable inherence masquerading as the “person” that concomitantly conjures the drama of God.

And look at what this naïve and contentious superstition has wrought. Look at the violence and fear and conformity and misogyny and multivalent racism of all types. The “isms”, the abuse of authority, the thirst for genocide, the despairing and indulgent onslaughts against the biosphere and the fecund generosity of the terrestrial mantle.

I don’t harbor a single doubt that you have had a wondrous relationship with an animated and affectionate voice and presence that has given and gifted you with a miraculous view.

With some admitted disappointment, because it would be cool to have Conversations with God, I do have my doubts (though they are irrelevant as well) that your friend is who “he” and “you” thinks “he” is. A presence that presumes and refers to itself as being separably existent is no God at all. That is just bullshit.

There is a common and unavoidable wall of delusion, diversion, and derision that afflicts all mediums, channels, and prophets. They can only share “information” according to their own conditioning and presumptions about what This is or isn’t generally according to one or a thousand genesis myths and cosmologies, all of which are blatantly, categorically, and mythically untrue.

You see Jerry, no one knows what This is or isn’t, not even God, and “he” would be the first to admit it. You may be aware of course, of the non-dual (and I’m not emphasizing or selling that gnarly shit either) philosophies from the East, but it is likely you have no firsthand experience (and that is not intended to diminish or marginalize you in any way) of the nature of realized mind, the nature of unfettered inclusivity. I may be wrong on that point, and I hope I am.

The wisdom that would flow from you had you gone down the liquidating path of erasure, would flow with impunity, owing to no one, grateful to no one and nothing. Such an emancipated mind would have no interest in the presence of a voice bearing knowledge or claiming omnipotent wisdom or authorship over anything.

There would be no autobiography; nothing has ever happened, and whatever may have appeared to happen did so a-causally. This is not what it is or isn’t owing to God, owing to an author, owing to a big bang or a great turtle. Presence renews and dissolves unceasingly with no discernable duration having no beginning and no implication.

My bias, and please don’t take it personally as it is not intended as such (and I know God has no dog in the fight) is that your pleasant God inspired, or God insipid pageantry is a ruse of imagination and does more to sustain the incarcerating myth of self and other than to contribute to the relief of the abuse of power that has been wielded by religious and scientific and political and spiritual miscreants for far too long.

We don’t need the God of your book, that ship done sailed. The species, were it to survive, needs to get on board with trans-temporal communion, with the revelation of radiant presence, with perfect autonomy.

I remain at your service. As I have mentioned before, you are always welcome to join a NSS meeting at your convenience.

I find this comment puzzling. Having met you when I spoke at the college, I took you to be a thoughtful seeker after spiritual truth. But your comment here is murky, dogmatic, and smacks of arrogance. I would love to continue the dialogue with you, since I am sure you can do better than this!

Thanks so much for your response of January 8th. As always, I find what you say provocative, and very well stated. As you suggested in your response, though, it does lead to even more questions.

On January 8th you write:

“To know God is to participate in and to actualize the life we share with the divine. In a sense, you don’t know that God exists until you have come to that deep personal appropriation of the divine reality within your heart, mind, and life.”

That sounds exactly right to me, and it corresponds closely with my own thinking along these lines. But it does seem to me to present certain problems.
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For instance, in your book God makes a rather big point of wanting obedience from human beings. But if we can’t even be sure of God’s existence until we have come to a “deep personal appropriation of the divine reality,” just what are we to obey? Are we to obey scriptural claims concerning what God demands? Whose scripture should we follow? How are we to know if the scriptural claims are accurate?

In section 29 of your book God says: “My commands are more than sacred and more than those of a king. They are absolute, one almost wants to say absolutely absolute, not absolute in this or that context or up to a certain point, the way you have to follow a court order unless it is overturned by a higher court. Even Supreme Court decisions and kings’ orders can be questioned and criticized. That is within human competence to do. Not with my commands. . . the structure of the world and of the spiritual development of the world requires absolute obedience, total yielding.”

But this way of speaking about God and God’s commands seems to me inconsistent with thinking of God as a divine reality that we can only truly know through a personal appropriation. What can it mean to say that we should obey God’s commands “absolutely” when the nature of knowing God is such that we cannot be certain what God’s commands are? What are we to obey?

As always, there is more to ask along these lines, Jerry, but perhaps I’ll just leave it there for now so as not to overcomplicate our dialogue.

And thank you once again for your willingness to entertain my questions!

If obedience defines the right relationship with God, the question arises: How do I know what God wants of me? How do I know what I am meant to do with my life, or today, right this minute?

I am told that God is communicating with everyone all the time. We just have to learn to pay attention. In my case, God made it easy by speaking to me in words – perhaps because He wanted me to write this book. But for most people, and for me too most of the time, the divine signals are faint or indirect. Even when they are loud or strongly felt, it is hard to be sure it is really a divine prompt rather than our own desires, fears, ego.

So the first step is to be still, be quiet, get the clutter out of the way, get centered. Pray or meditate or think deeply, like going down toward the ocean floor far below where the waves are lapping. See what your deep self seems to be telling you. Also, pay respectful attention to events in your life. Don’t assume they are mere happenings. Look for those significant coincidences that Carl Jung called “synchronicities” and probe what you might learn from them. Look for doors opening in your life, inviting you to step through them. Listen to people who come into your life and have something to tell you. God may be speaking to you through them.

The inconsistency or at least tension you note is real. We have to obey God, long before we know God in any deep, full way. We have to obey God “absolutely” even when we cannot do much more than guess what God wants of us. Nevertheless, the method works. By obeying God, we come to know God. And the mere effort to do so already puts our soul in the right relationship to God.

I understand the reasons for leaving off with Jesus in the evolution of All-In-All, but so much more has gone on. By the 4th and 5th centuries C.E., the Christian message was being codified and those Christians not on board with what the burgeoning Church laid down were persecuted and at time killed. [I go into this in my novel “In Her Own Words: The Real Story of Hypatia of Alexandria.”] It was during this period, too, that Jesus’ message became officially distorted and otherwise altered. So, this is one thing on the religious side.

Going back to the times of Joshua, Saul, David and others, Jewish armies dominated much of what we now call the Near East. Given that these were the Chosen People (I mean this in the sense from your book), they had an obligation you might say to spread the word. Perhaps they would have, had not the Romans confined them and eventually conquered them. Catholicism, as the carrier of the banner of Christianity, did what the Jews were not able to do but from the inside rather than through confrontation. The bishops essentially took over all the administrative mechanisms of the Imperial Empire.

So, this was probably a step forward in evolution.

However, due to the message getting distorted and the things of this world taking greater primacy in Church affairs, Islam came on the scene. I think it is fair to say that Islam actually constituted the first Reformation. Early Muslims also did what the Jews had not been able to do, which is take advantage of a weakened Empire and spread their “new” religion through strength of arms. Interestingly, Jesus (Issa) is honored in Islam as one of the major Prophets. Today, we do not think highly of spreading the faith by the sword, but unlike Joshua the Muslims at least gave people the choice of conversion or being relegated to the “dhimmi” community if they surrendered. Of course, it may be that this religion met with too much success too soon. It did not take long for political in-fighting and wars, not to mention exegesists, to warp this message, too.

Of course, since then there have been other prophets. Baha’ullah in Persia. Pak Subuh in Indonesia. And lots more I know nothing about! Anyway, I think all of these other developments over the last couple thousand years helped to bring us to the new Axial Age in which we find ourselves, with all of the ongoing conflicts.

As the book reports, I was told to pray about “Jesus going into Jerusalem, not Jesus coming out.” This provided a time-line cut-off for all the sacred texts I prayed about. It also implied that I was to pray about the Jesus of the Gospels, not subsequent Christianity. Following that guidance, I prayed about the sayings of the Buddha, not subsequent variants of Buddhism, and so on for other religions. Hence I have not prayed about Islam and other more recent movements. I don’t know if, at some point, I will be told about them. Yes, I did receive the message that we are “on the threshold of a new spiritual era, a new axial age.” That probably has to do more with current spiritual developments than with previous history. I have my own speculations, but we’ll have to stay tuned to find out. By the way, good luck on your very ambitious novel!

First, let me say (again) how much I appreciate your book. It is exciting, provocative, at times quite inspiring, and extraordinarily rich. That you have somehow managed to wrap all this in a very human narrative that allows your readers to feel that they have gotten to know both you AND God a bit is to your credit as a writer – and one of the great merits of the book.

The book does leave me with many questions, though, and I so appreciate your willingness to consider them.

Let me say at the outset that I ask these questions, not from a spirit of skepticism or cynicism, but from an earnest desire to understand and to take your book seriously.

Perhaps the first question that occurs to me is why, if God is able to speak to human beings as he speaks to you, does God not speak to us all as he speaks to you? I have known many atheists and agnostics who are so, not out of stubbornness or defiance or perversity, but simply because they have no experience they would identify as an experience of God. If indeed God is a person, somewhat like a human person, and God can speak in language to a human being, somewhat as one person can speak to another, and God wishes to be known by human beings (as he tells us in your book), then why does God not simply speak to us all in an unambiguous manner? Why is this God – who wishes both to be known by us and obeyed by us – so very coy with us? Why does he leave us so often in ignorance and confusion?

So there is my first question for you, Jerry. I look forward to your reply.

Why does not God speak to us all as he speaks to me? Why does God not simply speak to us all in an unambiguous manner?

In the course of the book, I am told that God communicates to us in many different ways – not just words, but epiphanies, intuitions, insights, conscience, “thoughts that seems as if they were your own,” even dreams, events that seem like coincidences (synchronicities), and tasks put in our path.

God said, “I am not just typing out telegraph messages.” Why not? Why all these indirect, ambiguous ways of communicating, instead of just coming out and telling everybody the whole story? Well, look at analogies. Why does the teacher ask the students questions instead of just giving them the answers? Learning has to be active. Why does the psychotherapist ask questions, instead of just telling the client what’s wrong with him? Therapy has to bring about change from the inside.

I am also told that God speaks with a soft “still small voice.” Why not in a loud voice? Well, that forces us to do our part. Sometimes a public speaker intentionally softens his voice. That is a way to make the audience quiet down, lean forward, and listen. To relate to God, we have to pay close attention. Many of the obstacles to “hearing” God are internal to ourselves – our ego, our desires, our dogmatisms, often simply the distractions of daily life. We have to get our own clutter out of the way. God is not trying to communication “information.” For that, telegraph messages would have been better. God is trying to open our hearts and orient our lives. Relating to God must be transformative.

There may be something even more subtle taking place here. We and God are mutual participants in the drama of the world. There is not a predetermined script, either for us or for God. I am told at one point that God is like the director of an improvisational theatre. We are all making up our lines as we go along. And we the actors are deaf or not paying attention. God is furiously giving hand-signals, but we can’t decipher them or neglect to do so. Why doesn’t God write out the directions and put them on big cards right in front of the actors’ eyes? Well, in life, like in improv theatre, the actors spontaneously play off one another. They catch each other’s pace and direction, and creatively adapt and prompt in a way that moves the plot or the comedy along. To change analogies, think about the subtle communications between two lovers, which have their own suggestive rhythms and indirections that would be spoiled by explicit articulation. Even the diplomatic aspects of family life have this character of sometimes letting the glance or the gesture do the talking. That is a natural way for free, creative, growing persons, whether human or divine, to relate to one another.

This is a profound topic, Richard, Please feel free to probe it further.

Thanks so much for your response to my question. I find your answers interesting and helpful, although, as you yourself suggest, they lead to more questions.

You say that God does not speak directly to us because he wishes to be like a teacher, who doesn’t wish to give his students direct answers that they will learn by rote, but presents his students with questions and suggestions that will prompt them to think and learn for themselves.

I like that answer, but it raises for me another question: The teacher, after all, doesn’t leave the students in doubt as to the existence of the teacher himself! But God leaves us wondering, not only about the answers to our questions, but about whether a God exists who can or might answer them. God leaves us (many of us, anyway) in doubt as to whether there truly is a God.

Why? What is the specific value of not knowing whether God exists, not knowing whether our lives extend beyond our earthly lives, not knowing whether there is a definitive difference between true and false, right and wrong, good and evil?

It occurs to me that one way of answering this question might be to say that the relationship of a human being to God is not (ultimately) like the relationship of one person to another, but more like the relationship of a person in youth to the same person in maturity. In other words, maybe we only come to know that God exists as we grow in our understanding of the nature of existence itself; an understanding we can only approach through a process of maturation. That would account for why we must grow into ‘knowing’ God.

But if this is the case then God is not really best envisioned as another person with whom we can have a simple conversation. God is better envisioned as a higher (maybe highest?) dimension of ourselves.

Would this way of putting it correspond with your understanding, Jerry? If so, it leads me to yet another question, about the nature of your own revelatory experiences. What are they? Are they coming from an entity fully distinct from yourself – like another person? Or are they somehow coming from a higher dimension of yourself? Or might this question itself present a false dichotomy – insofar as God IS (in some sense) the highest dimension of ourselves?

There is more to ask, but perhaps I should wait until I hear your response to these questions before I venture upon any more.

And thanks so much again, Jerry, for your willingness to dialogue about these questions!

Thanks for continuing the dialogue. We have to extend the analogy of the teacher and the lesson that knowledge has to an active coming-to-know on the part of the student. Psychotherapy works in much the same way. The patient does not just receive an analysis but is taken through a long process of questioning until the insights dawn on and are fully actualized within him or her. Now, ratchet that analogy up a few levels. Knowing God really requires, virtually presupposes, a total reorientation of mind-body-soul. A series of telegrams from God, including one that says “I exist,” would not achieve that. To know God is to participate in and to actualize the life we share with the divine. In a sense, you don’t know that God exists until you have come to that deep personal appropriation of the divine reality within your heart, mind, and life. Still, at a more basic level, God has not exactly kept His/Her/Its existence a secret. It’s just that some people, particularly in a secular age, find it really hard to believe. Or prefer not to believe.

The only way to correctly describe my experience is as an encounter with a Person. I considered Jung’s theory of the Higher Self. Might my Higher Self announce itself as “God” and tell me a lot of things, including to write a book? Tell me things I did not believe and, in fact, sometimes found quite disturbing? Tell me, on my first read ever of the sacred text of another tradition, what God was trying to communicate to them?

As you say, I am told that God is both same as other as us. But the way in which we and God are the same does not eclipse the way we are different. And, in God: An Autobiography, I am told why we must be different, why we must encounter each other as persons, and have a relationship, not just an identity.

Every question raises more questions. Keep em coming, Richard!

Richard OxenbergJanuary 11, 2017

Hi Jerry,

Thanks again for your response. As always, I find what you say provocative and well stated, but it does lead me to more questions.

You write:

“To know God is to participate in and to actualize the life we share with the divine. In a sense, you don’t know that God exists until you have come to that deep personal appropriation of the divine reality within your heart, mind, and life.”

That sounds exactly right to me, and it corresponds closely with my own thinking along these lines. But it does seem to me to present certain problems.
.
For instance, in your book God makes a rather big point of wanting obedience from human beings. But if we can’t even be sure of God’s existence until we have come to a “deep personal appropriation of the divine reality,” just what are we to obey? Are we to obey scriptural claims concerning what God demands? Whose scripture should we follow? How are we to know if the scriptural claims are accurate?

In section 29 of your book God says: “My commands are more than sacred and more than those of a king. They are absolute, one almost wants to say absolutely absolute, not absolute in this or that context or up to a certain point, the way you have to follow a court order unless it is overturned by a higher court. Even Supreme Court decisions and kings’ orders can be questioned and criticized. That is within human competence to do. Not with my commands. . . the structure of the world and of the spiritual development of the world requires absolute obedience, total yielding.”

But this way of speaking about God and God’s commands seems to me inconsistent with thinking of God as a divine reality that we can only truly know through a personal appropriation. What can it mean to say that we should obey God’s commands “absolutely” when the nature of knowing God is such that we cannot be certain what God’s commands are? What are we to obey?

As always, there is more to ask along these lines, Jerry, but perhaps I’ll just leave it there for now so as not to overcomplicate our dialogue.

And thank you once again for your willingness to entertain my questions!

Thank you for your kind words Jerry. Chander now has an autographed copy of the book!!! He is full of wisdom and I am sure he will be further enriched by the messages in the book.

I am taking the liberty to reply to question by a reader – “At the heart of your book is God’s desire to reveal himself to human beings, to be known by human beings. One almost senses a loneliness in God that he hopes will be resolved, or at least mitigated, through such revelation. But this raises many questions. Why – if God can speak to human beings as he speaks to you – does he not speak to us all as he speaks to you? Why, if God wants us to know him intimately, does he reveal himself (to most of us) so remotely?”

Answer: At different levels of consciousness we will experience different aspects of God. An important purpose of life is to evolve and walk in greater and greater awareness upon this planet. As we do this, a natural outcome would be greater revelations of All That There Is which is God! A common example noticed by meditators is that trees look sharper and more vibrant against the backdrop of the sky after meditation!!!

If All is revealed all at once to all, the purpose of life to experience all the levels of consciousness will be thwarted. Somewhat like, if the color “white” wishes to experience itself fully it would need to be all the seven spectrum colors one by one, and not all at once. To experience the aspect of All Knowingness one has to first experience not-knowing; to experience being tall one has to also experience being short!

I posted my question of 9/27/16 before I noticed that you have already replied to another version of my question. I like your answer a lot and it corresponds rather closely to some of my own thinking. It does lead me to further questions, however – questions that pertain to how we are to read Jerry’s book and understand his experience. I’ve already posed some of these questions to Jerry offline and he suggested it might be profitable to discuss them online.

So rather than push forward in asking these questions I think it best to await Jerry’s reply to my post. Then perhaps all three of us can continue to dig more deeply into this.

Jerry, hi was introduced about you by a dear friend in Lucknow, India, Ajit Dass. We got talking on matters of the soul and the spirit. He spoke very highly of your book God: An Autobiography. Will go through the excerpts on your site.
The journey beyond the dimensions of the human mind…the trajectory of a soul to a spirit while still being a part of the finite world….is a dimension limited to very few blessed ….being one with the infinite…is being one with God….and being able to transmit and cross the borders of finite and infinite at will …..is truly a blessing…..an indication how close you are to the eternal dissolution of your identity.

It is important that readers spread the word to friends who might benefit from the book. Ajit Dass has become my own faraway friend and is one of the book’s best readers. I am pleased now to know you both. As part of our agreement with Kindle, we do not post excerpts as such any more. However, if you register at the website, you can receive a free pdf of the first two parts of the book. Please let me hear from you again as you read into it. And please give Ajit my warmest greetings!

What Other People Are Saying About the Book…

Once I finished a draft of the book, I asked people I knew – some I knew well and some I had only recently met -- to take a look and give me some quick comments. I pointedly did not ask for praise, but for “honest responses,” since only those would be helpful in editing the book. Here are excerpts from their comments.
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“This work has the potential to be the most influential book in our time. It exudes spiritual authenticity as it is well-grounded in human experience. It advances a way to embrace spirituality in oneself. As your own experience, the work is anchored in our time, our experience.”- Celeste Colgan, Ph.D. (English), former Deputy Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities

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“If there is a God, this is what he sounds like.”- Stephen H. Balch, Founding President, National Association of Scholars

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“Thanks for this wonderful gift. This is a remarkable document. I’m only two-thirds though, and I’m anxious to see how things turn out.”- Wesley Morriston, Ph.D. (Philosophy), Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder; Board Member, Society of Christian Philosophers)

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“I am reading your draft slowly as a devotional and am so full of thoughts and feelings about it that it is hard to know where to begin. I think this is very important. Much of it sounds like God to me, sounds like how what I take to be God sounds in those moments when I am in touch (and I am struck by how very in-touch you are, how constantly). The freshness of the talk, so fresh it makes you laugh -- I experience God that way. The wisdom. The love. The reproach when necessary (how God exits when ego enters).”- Jeanine Diller, Ph.D. (Philosophy), Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo

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“It is one of the most intriguing, unusual, passionate things I have ever read. It is very special.”- Matthew Foster, Ph.D. (Theology), Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies, Molloy College

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